| Title | : | A Short History of Myth |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 184195800X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781841958002 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 176 |
| Publication | : | First published October 5, 2005 |
A Short History of Myth Reviews
-
(B-) 70% | Satisfactory
Notes: Written academically, it's more a long essay than a book; covering lots of subject matter, it never really goes in depth. -
Karen Armstrong attempts to take us through the story of how myth has evolved in human history, affected its progress, how the contemporary society deals with it and the future direction it might or should take. For such a vast scope, a book that is less than 200 pages was bound to end up with a sketch that is barely an outline, let alone a complete history.
For a student of myth, this cannot even serve as an introduction to the scope and breadth of the study of mythologies, but for the casual reader, it can provide some interesting tea-time conversation at best.
To cut a short story shorter, here is A Shorter History of Myth:
The Paleolithic Period: The Mythology of the Hunters (c. 20000 to 8000
BCE)
We are meaning-seeking creatures. From our earliest awakenings of consciousness, we started to ascribe meanings and stories to things we found among and around us. The traditions of myth started in tis earliest phase of human history. As hunter-gatherers, Armstrong contends that human's being the only creatures conscious of their acts had a deep apprehension, a guilt, about killing other creatures for their own sustenance. So they built up stories to explain this and developed a cult of sacrifice to give the act of killing a symbolic significance of supplication and respect.
In this society, the males probably dominated and the mythology reflects this male domination. Most of these primitive gods were male. Everything that was wondrous and unexplainable were made the stuff of myth, The gods were the architects of the world and everything was orchestrated by them. The sky and the rains and thunder and fire were the great mysteries and these formed the earliest myths, the earliest gods.
The
Neolithic Period: The Mythology of the Farmers (c. 8000 to 4000 BCE)
Then we invented farming. As our way of life changed, our myths too began to change. The cyclic nature of seasons and rain became more important than abstract entities life the sky and planets. The old gods were either forgotten or changed into agricultural deities. The greatest mystery now was this wonder - that earth can renew itself and bring out food for their sustenance. The seed they sow was converted as if in a womb. The Myth of the
Earth-Goddess started to grow. Of a sustaining goddess that demands great sacrifice. The act of sex began to have symbolic meaning, human copulation aiding and abetting in earth's fertility. With fertility cults and the
personal gods who bring rain and floods and with a mother goddess that responded to care, the world was a very personal interaction with these mythical beings.
The Early Civilisations (c. 4000 to 800 BCE)
Soon agriculture gave way to city building and more organized ways of life. Men started to have more control over their lives. Irrigation and organized agriculture brought more and more of the mysteries of nature under man's control. THe myths about the fertility gods too now started to sound remote. Myths that do not touch our everyday lives tend to die out, ignored.
But as the myths and the gods started becoming more and more distant, humans felt a deep spiritual anguish that was soon to culminate in the greatest spiritual revolution that man has ever seen.
The
Axial Age (c. 800 to 200 BCE)
The axial age is called so because it was a pivotal time in which the greatest philosophies of the ancient age, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Confucianism, Jainism etc all arose in the same time.
It was a response to the great spiritual chasm that man was feeling as we separated from nature. We still needed an understanding of our significance in the world. A reason for living. As city life progressed. we developed myths about gods who lived in cities like ours with divine order - a utopia in the havens. We dreamed of recreating such order here in the world.
The axial leaders turned the focus away from gods and heavens and asked men and women to focus on their own lives, thoughts and action. They told that we are responsible for our own actions and no gods guide out fates. They wanted to recreate a heavenly order on the human sphere and focused on strict codes of living, rituals and mores and codes of conduct. These were the first stirring of
organized religion and myths started the conversion to religion.
The Post-Axial Period (c. 200 BCE to c. 1500 CE)
Men started codifying the laws of religions and laws of life and converted myths into beliefs. they turned from symbols giving us guidance on how to live to concrete facts and gods that tell us how to live in exact terms. We converted historical figures like Jesus into archetypal myths and imbued them with divine characteristics and tried to come to terms with the lack of guidance.
This was also the time when the early Greeks started their exploration of
Logos or logic. They encouraged us to reject the unverifiable and the intuitive and to choose Logos over Mythos, leading humankind inevitably on to the next major change in human history
The
Modern Age (c. 1500 to 2000)
Logos finally won over Mythos and we used our logic and our understanding to gain unprecedented control over our environment and our own lives. But while we progressed materially, we seem to have regressed spiritually. the respect and reverence for nature, to our fellow creatures and to each other turned into an attitude of exploitation and self-serving that led to great catastrophes like the world wars and mass massacres. We now are gradually realizing that perhaps we need to get back to the myths and the old stories to help us make sense of our lives and to get back an appreciation of nature and of life, to learn to live together without destroying each other and our planet.
For that we need to let Mythos come back from the corner it was beaten into by our all-pervading Logos.
The real message of the book comes out in this section. It deals with the modern societies obsession with Logos over Mythos and its rejection of these fundamentally psychological
coping mechanisms that are myths, the primal stories that give us a sense of place in this otherwise meaningless existence. Apparently that is one of the fundamental requirements of the human condition.
This last section of the book is about how myth survives in today's world. Armstrong says that it is now the duty of the artists and the writers to carry on the tradition of mythology, which is he only tool we mankind has ever developed that helps us cope with ourselves. She also goes into great detail to give examples of modern works that are built on myths such as
Ulysses and
The Waste Land.
"We have seen that a myth could never be approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation. None of this, surely, applies to the novel, which can be read anywhere at all without ritual trappings, and must, if it is any good, eschew the overtly didactic. Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not real and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathize with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to feel with others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever."
The agenda at this point becomes very clear and the book's denouement is clearly an invocation towards asking novelists to take up old myths and use them and reexamine them; this of course leads smoothly on to the fact that the book is an introduction to the
Canongate Myth Series, which has commissioned a series of works from authors such as
Margaret Atwood,
Philip Pullman and
Victor Pelevin, each of which is designed to be a modern version of an ancient myth. I have to admit that this was my original motivation to pick up the book as I really wanted to read
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
Karen Armstrong does give a clear and well reasoned argument for the need for Myth in our daily life and in our art but does not really do justice to the title of the book. -
A Short History of Myth (Canongate's The Myths #1), Karen Armstrong
A Short History of Myth. 2005. A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong describes what these stories are and what they're not.
A myth is not a lie or just a story, for example, nor is it simply an explanation of scientific phenomena, as we're often told.
Myths are also not about comfort or condolence, but force people to face the realities of life and death.
And as we moderns become more captivated by ideals of truth and science, Armstrong warns that we've also become more rigid, unable to accept stories that don't conform to our expectations of a literal truth; we maroon ourselves in a less joyful existence.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «تاریخ مختصر اسطوره»؛ «تاریخچه مختصر اسطوره»؛ نویسنده: کارن آرمسترانگ؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و پنجم ماه آگوست سال 2014میلادی
عنوان: تاریخ مختصر اسطوره؛ نویسنده: کارن آرمسترانگ؛ مترجم عباس مخبر؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، 1390؛ در 113ص؛ شابک 9789642131457؛چاپ سوم 1396؛ موضوع تاریخ اسطوره از نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده 21م
فهرست: «اسطوره چیست؟»؛ «دوران کهن سنگی اسطوره شناسی شکارگران»؛ «دوران نوسنگی: اسطوره شناسی کشاورزان»؛ «تمدنهای اولیه از چهارهزار تا هشتصد سال پیش از میلاد»؛ «عصر محوری از هشتصد تا دویست سال پیش از میلاد»؛ «دوران پسامحوری حدود دویست سال پیش از میلاد تا حدود هزار و پانصد میلادی»؛ «تحول بزرگ غرب از حدود هزار و پانصد تا دوهزار میلادی»؛ منابع، و نمایه؛
عنوان: تاریخچه مختصر اسطوره؛ نویسنده: کارن آرمسترانگ؛ مترجم: مصطفی لنگبافان؛ تهران، هنر پارسینه، 1397؛ در 121ص؛ شابک9786009620104؛
اسطوره یک دروغ یا داستان، و به عنوان نمونه، توضیح پدیده های علمی، همانگونه که نوشته یا گفته میشود هم، نیست؛ هیچگاه روایت یگانه، و کهنسالی، از یک اسطوره وجود نداشته، با دیگر شدن شرایط، نیاز بوده، که داستانهامان را به گونه ای دیگر بازگو نمائیم، تا راستیهای بی زمانی را، که در دل آنهاست، بتوانیم بیرون بکشیم؛ در این «تاریخ مختصر اسطوره» خواهیم دید، که هر گا�� مردان و زنان، گامی به پیش برداشته اند، اسطوره های خویش را نیز بازبینی کرده، و آنها را با سخن زمان نوین خویش، در آن گاه و در آن زمان به سخن آنروز سروده اند؛ اما این را نیز میخوانیم که ماهیت بشر دیگر نمیشود، هر چند بسیاری از این اسطوره ها، در کشورهایی آفریده شده اند، که بیشترین دیگرگونگی را با جامعه ی کنونی خویش داشته اند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 03/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی -
چون تصمیم دارم هر چی از کارن آرمسترانگ دیدم بخونم، اینو در اولین فرصت گرفتم و وسط کتاب دگرگونی بزرگ، خوندمش.
کتاب در چند فصل، نقاط عطف تاریخ اسطوره و دین رو شرح میده. نقاطی که اسطوره و دین، تحت تأثیر عوامل اجتماعی و اقتصادی و... به شکلی عمیق متحول شده.
جوامع شکارگر
در دوران پارینهسنگی، جوامع از راه شکار و جمع آوری غذا تهیه می کردن. اولین وجه مشخصهٔ اسطوره های این جوامع، خدای آسمان بود، خدایی معمولاً بی شکل و غیرانسانانگارانه، که در مرتبهٔ اول قرار نبود کاری برای مردم انجام بده و نفعی برسونه، بلکه حاصل احساس قدسی هیبت در برابر آسمان دور از دسترس بود. این خدا در دوران کشاورزی کم کم در حاشیه قرار گرفت و خدایان متعدد زمینی و در دسترس و انسانانگارانه و نفعرسان جاش رو گرفتن.
دومین مشخصهٔ باورهای جوامع شکارچی، اسطورهٔ سفر قهرمان بود. شکارچی ها برای تهیهٔ غذا باید روزها از خونه و محیط امن قبیله دور می شدن و خطرات پیشبینیناپذیری رو به جون می پذیرفتن و در نهایت با کشتن/قربانی کردن موجودی زنده که به نوعی برادر یا پسرعموی خودشون می دونستن، برای مردمشون غذا می آوردن. بازتاب این سفر اسرارآمیز که شکارچی رو برای همیشه متحول می کرد، در اسطورهٔ سفر قهرمان تبلور پیدا کرده: قهرمانی که از خونه دور میشه، به جهان اسرارآمیز ناشناخته ها میره، و در نهایت بعد از کشتن غول ها و خدایان و حتی خودش، دوباره متولد میشه و با برکت قدسی به خونه و نزد مردمش بر میگرده.
جوامع کشاورزی
در دوران نوسنگی کم کم بشر کشاورزی رو یاد گرفت، و این تغییر بزرگ در شکل زندگی، تغییری بزرگ در باورهای دینی رو به همراه داشت. خدای آسمان جاش رو به خدایان زمینی داد که با کشت و کشاورزی ارتباط داشت. مثلاً یهوه با بعل و عشتار جایگزین شد و همین طور ایندرا با خدایان دیگه.
مشحصهٔ اصلی دین دوران کشاورزی، خدای میرنده و رستاخیز کننده بود: خدایی که شهید می شد، به دنیای مردگان می رفت، و همزمان تمام گیاهان خشک می شدن، و با انجام آیین هایی در بهار دوباره زنده می شد و همزمان گیاهان رشد می کردن.
در این دو فصل مؤلف تا حد زیادی از نظریات میرچا الیاده و جوزف کمبل استفاده کرده بود.
جوامع شهری
بعد از ساخته شدن شهرها، همراه با زیر و رو شدن شکل قدیمی زندگی، ادیان قدیمی هم به شدت متزلزل شدن. دنیایی که خدایان جوامع دایرهای کشاورزی تصویر می کردن در جامعهٔ خطی شهری به کار نمی اومد: جوامع شهری پیچیده تر از اون بودن که با اسطورههای تکرار شوندهٔ مربوط به چرخهٔ ثابت بهار و زمستان، بشه نیازهای معنوی مردم رو سیراب کرد. پس، هر چند دین های شهری پراکنده ای پدید اومدن با خدایانی که قبل از هر چیز مهندس و معمار شهرهای آسمانی بودن، اما اضطراب و سرگشتگی بیشتر و بیشتر می شد، و این منجر شد به انقلاب معنوی که کارن آرمسترانگ توی چند کتاب توجهش رو مصروف به اون کرده.
عصر محوری
در برهه ای پونصد ششصد ساله از تاریخ، از قرن هشتم تا قرن دوم پیش از میلاد، در نقاط مختلف جهان، از چین و هند تا اسرائیل و یونان، فرزانه هایی ظهور کردن که همه نوع مشابهی از معنویت رو تبلیغ می کردن و در حقیقت، در این دوران بود که اسطوره جای خودش رو داد به دین به اون معنا که ما امروز می شناسیم.
این فرزانه ها، لائوتسه، کنفوسیوس، بودا، نویسندگان گمنام اوپانیشاد، ارمیا و حزقیال، و سقراط، همه نوعی معرفت شخصی رو جایگزین معرفت جمعی اسطوره می کردن. همه می گفتن هر کس باید سلوکی شخصی برای رسیدن به حقیقتی درونی داشته باشه، و حقیقت چیزی نیست که حاضر و آماده از سنت دریافت بشه. تمام این فرزانه ها به معنویت و اخلاق، مخصوصاً به همدردی و ازخودگذشتگی اهمیت زیادی می دادن. تمام این فرزانه ها نگاهی انتقادی به اسطوره ها داشتن و گاهی اون ها رو به کلی رد می کردن، و گاهی به صورت تمثیلی بازتفسیرشون می کردن.
کارن آرمسترانگ به خصوص معتقده که ما بعد از این انقلاب معنوی، دیگه پیشرفتی از لحاظ معنوی نداشتیم، و امروز هم به آرمان های عصر محوری محتاجیم، و می تونیم برخی یا تمام راه حل های فرزانگان اون دوره رو متناسب با زمان خودمون به کار ببریم.
دوران جدید
فصل های بعدی نویسنده به دوران روشنگری و عصر جدید پرداخت، که در حقیقت دوران پایان اسطوره بودن، و گفت که نبود معنا چه ضررهایی برای تمدن غربی داشته و این خلأ باید با چیزهایی مثل هنر و مخصوصاً رمان پر بشه، مباحثی که کمابیش باهاش آشناییم. -
This is a likeable book, but it is overwhelmingly Karin Armstrong’s book and my lasting impression was that I am not in tune enough with Karin Armstrong to best appreciate this book, which made it far more complex for me to read than I suspect that she intended.
To my mind, a couple of days after reading, this book is like an upside down pudding and to explain it I need to flip it round and start discussing it where this book ends, perhaps I need to give the book a new title to better in my opinion explain what it is all about, and that would be ‘Why the “West” is in such a snake filled pit and how we can get out of it’.
For Armstrong there is our familiar earthly realm, but along side it there is a divine, or spiritual reality. Myths, for her, explain the relationship of the physical with the metaphysical. One of her examples of this is the escape of the Hebrews through the Red Sea: in the physical realm this is a singular event, but spiritually she says, it demonstrates God’s relationship with the chosen people and so the myth teaches the faithful the nature of that relationship. You may notice that for Armstrong religion is not distinct from myth, it is a part of myth, therefore for her a short history of myth turns out to be a short history of religion , it is plain though that it is religion that interests her, not myth.
This she explores chronologically: Old Stone Age, New Stone age, Early civilisations, Axial Age, post Axial period , then “the Great Western transformation” - the final chapter title gives he game away really, the ‘West’ (The WEIRD countries) are not like everywhere else, no they are worse, because in Armstrong’s view they have lost the interface provided by myth between the physical and the metaphysical. The depth of the snake pit for Armstrong is illustrated by a number of books;
Under the Volcano,
The Magic Mountain,
The waste land, and
Heart of darkness , some what she says about these books I felt was very interesting – heart of darkness and Magic mountain as flawed hero’s quests, in the traditional narrative there needs to be death and rebirth, while in the modern narrative there is just death and no new life (pp 147-153).
For Armstrong, and this is her important point, the West has gone wrong, starting with Plato and Aristotle, getting worse with worshipping one God, down to our current position in the snake pit, getting bitten in sensitive places by vipers, a consequence of divorcing ourselves from the spiritual realm . Personally I think she is wrong in lots of ways – starting by conflating religion and myth, I could write about that all day (in theory) because I sighed deep within reading as if I had been given Casaubon's Key to all mythologies as though it were a worthwhile exploration of myth, but I think more importantly, that her sense of loss and particularly that “western” civilisation has lost something essential is a widespread one, to my mind she is articulating much the same pain as T.S. Elliot, or Max Weber with his Iron Cage of life in a modern capitalist society. Part of me feels they might all require the spiritual equivalent of a hip transplant but I also recall Rebecca Solnit in
The Faraway Nearby saying "Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself". -
This book began by making a sweeping, unfounded generalization, and then irritated the heck out of me.
That's not a great way for a book to start.
In fact, if I'd just been reading it for fun I would have been tempted to stop. But I'm determined to read all the Canongate Myths, and for whatever reason this one is listed first. And it's only 150 pages long so, I figured, how bad can it be?
It starts by stating categorically that humans are the only animals to have language, the think on a meta level, and to play. These are all untrue. They're not even up for debate. The degree to which they're true is debated, hotly, but the bald fact that other animals have language, metacognition, and play is not at question in serious scientific circles. To suggest otherwise is just pure, blatant lazy thinking and bad research.
I figured these antiquated notions must reflect the old age of the book, but it turns out it was published in 2005. The source she cites for these ideas, however, was published in 1949. That's just lazy researching. That's fishing for a citation for a fact that you assume is true and don't want to put the effort into researching. And that just makes me crabby. How am I supposed to believe anything else Armstrong has to say if she's not even going to take researching seriously?
At that point, I really just started to squabble with the book, and Armstrong did nothing to redeem herself. For 100 or 120 pages, it all reads like a term paper written the night before its due date. There are interesting ideas, but they are scantily supported and the internal logic is not strong.
She makes sweeping generalizations (about why sky gods died out, for example, or assuming that sky god religions died out). She gets her logic confused, and repeatedly contradicts herself. She states that early humans did not distinguish between mundane, profane, and divine, but then uses exactly those terms to define how they thought about something. She makes unsupported statements about the state of mind of humans millennia ago, something she can't know, and gives no information regarding how she reached her conclusions. She uses modern perspective to analyze ancient times.
She keeps telling us that myths don't make sense without their liturgy or their rituals, but never explains this and, furthermore, doesn't explain how that fits in with her writing about myths in the first place.
The only reason I kept reading was stubbornness, and the fact that someone who'd read this (library!) copy before me had clearly had the same reaction. Wry, witty, comments in green ink at the most irksome sections kept me entertained. At least I wasn't alone.
I was all prepared to give this book two stars at the most when I hit page 130, and all of a sudden things got good.
The very last section of the book is where Armstrong hid her thesis: Humans need myths, and mythical thinking, to survive successfully. The degeneration of mythical thinking is at fault for most of our societal ills. Not that we need to believe someone can save us, but strict materialism doesn't seem to be working. This is extremely interesting, and she has some fascinating things to say on the topic of religious fundamentalism and creationism.
The last 20 pages or so are worth four stars, maybe even five. They are meaty, intelligent, and ripe for exploration. It's a pity I had to read so far to get there, and got so annoyed along the way. -
یکی از انتقادهایی که همواره به الیاده و بخشی از آثار جوزف کمبل می شود، این است که بررسی تطبیقی اسطوره ها توسط این دو، بدون توجه به بافتارِ تاریخی، اجتماعی و سیاسی و فرهنگی منحصر بفرد هر منطقه انجام می گیرد.
در این جا کارن آرمسترانگ به عنایت به این انتقاد، تلاش نموده است تا در این کتاب، نظریات الیاده و کمبل را در چارچوبی تاریخی و انسان شناختی قرار داده، و به تحلیل و طبقه بندی تحولاتِ نظام های اسطوره شناختی در گذر زمان بپردازد.
آرمسترانگ پس از تقسیم بندی تحولات تاریخی جوامع انسانی به دوره های مختلف، به بررسی ویژگی نظام های اسطوره شناختی آن ها می پردازد. وی این بررسی را در 6 بخشِ دوران کهن سنگی(جوامع شکار)، دوران نوسنگی(جوامع کشاورز)، تمدن های اولیه(جوامع شهرنشین)، عصر محوی(ظهور پیامبران و حکیمان بزرگ)، دوران پسامحوری(ظهور سه دین ابراهیمی بزرگ)، تحول بزرگ غرب(دوران اسطوره زدایی) انجام می دهد و نسبتِ عوامل اقتصادی و اجتماعی جوامع انسانی در هر دوره ی زمانی را با نظام اسطوره شناختی آن ها نشان می دهد.
اما انتقادی که به نظرم می توان به کتاب وارد دانست، وفاداری سفت و سختِ نویسنده به سلسله مراتب تاریخی ست؛ در واقع می دانیم که دوره های تاریخی ای که وی ترسیم می کند، این چنین دارای مرزهای زمانی مشخصی نبوده اند که بتوان آن ها را به سادگی از هم متمایز کرد (می دانیم که در یک زمانِ خاص ممکن بود در بخشهای مختلفی از جهان، این جوامع را بطور همزمان داشته باشیم. مثلا همین الان که در عصر اسطوره زدایی به سر می بریم، هنوز جوامع گردآورنده-شکارچی را در بخش هایی از جهان می بینیم).
همچنین نویسنده هرگز به این نمی پردازد که چرا با وجود گذر از جوامع کهن سنگی و نوسنگی، هنوز شاهدِ دوامِ اسطوره ها و آیین های نظام های اسطوره شناختی آن ها (جشن هایی کشاورزی مثل عید نوروز) در دنیای امروز هستیم، و بقا و استحاله ی این آیین ها و نمادها را زیر سبیلی رد کرده است و برای همین است که فصل آخر، جوامع دنیای امروز را خالی از هرگونه اسطوره وبرهوت (نسبتا) کاملی می داند. در حالی که الیاده به صراحت از اسطوره های دنیای امروز و بقای اسطوره ها در دنیای معاصر سخن به میان می آورد.
همچنین نظام سلسله مراتبیِ ترسیم شده در کتاب، به منِ خواننده چنین القا می کند که نویسنده سه دین ابراهیمی (یهودیت، مسیحیت و اسلام) را نقطه ی پایانی و غایتِ سیرِ تفکر اسطوره ای و ادیان می داند (چیزی که الیاده بشدت و به صراحت از آن پرهیز کرده است).
پ نوشت: این کتاب، برای شروع جدیِ مطالعه ی نظام های اسطوره شناختی و تحولات آن، کتاب موجز و مناسبی ست و از آن می توان بعنوان مدخلی برای ورود به این دنیای گسترده استفاده کرد. -
I loved Karen Armstrong's A Short History on Myth precisely because it was extremely concise without being simplistic. The author has conveyed her knowledge in an extremely lucid way, spanning myth from its beginnings during the Paleolithic Period as an essential part of human existence to its existence as a dead and fossilised mummy in the religions of today, taking life only in the imagination of artists and writers. One can, of course, differ with her conclusions - in a subject like this, it would be surprising if there were any consensus.
Having read
Joseph Campbell's massive four volume Masks of God, I sort of knew what to expect - and Ms. Armstrong didn't disappoint. Of course, whereas Campbell focusses heavily on the Jungian aspects of myth, Karen covers a number of other aspects too. But her approach is also more tuned towards the psychological interpretation of myth than the historical.An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.
Karen Armstrong has divided the development mythology into six distinct periods - the paleolithic, the neolithic, the period of the early civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the "Axial Age" (800 - 200 BCE), the "Post-Axial Period"(200 BCE - 1500 CE), and our modern era. In each of these periods, myth formed and unformed and changed shape according to the development of the communal psyche.
Myth began with the ethos of the hunt in the Paleolithic Period. As Joseph Campbell once said, "life eats life". The carnivores and omnivores of the animal kingdom other than homo sapiens, lacking the ability to think about it, are not bothered - but killing disturbs us because we feel it inherently against nature to take a life. So, the concept of sacrifice evolved - of the sacrificial animal laying down its life willingly, and being deified in the process. At the same time, nature was also mythified and the "Sky God" was born.
The author is at pains to assert here that for primitive man, myth and reason occupied two different planes, never interacting - that of the mythos and the logos.Myth and logos both have their limitations, however. In the pre-modern world, most people realised that myth and reason were complementary; each had its separate sphere, each its particular area of competence, and human beings needed both these modes of thought. A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey or how to organise an expedition efficiently, but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals. Logos was efficient, practical and rational, but it could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life nor could it mitigate human pain and sorrow.
A key figure during this period is the shaman: the person who can move into the transcendent plane at will to touch base with the Godhead. It is he who provides the bridge between the sacred and the profane.
The dichotomy between these two worlds remained during the neolithic period, only the myth changed - instead of the story of the hunt, we now have the story of the seed going beneath the ground and regenerating: that of the murdered god going beneath the ground and coming back as fresh life. (The myth of Persephone is a leftover from this era - and once we come to India, that of Sita, Rama's consort, being discovered in the farmer king's furrow is another example. The harvest festival of Onam in Kerala is ostensibly to celebrate the return of the mythical king Mahabali who ruled the country once, and who was banished underground by Lord Vishnu, to return on this one day. This is also an example of a neolithic myth being grafted on to Indian mythology.) However, people could still differentiate myth from reality, and give both their space.
Once humans began building cities, myth once again changed hue to accommodate them as the centre of existence. However, with the beginning of civilisation, history started - and the dreamtime of myth started moving away from the human sphere.Hitherto mythology had centred almost entirely on the primordial feats and struggles of the gods or the archetypal ancestors of primordial time. But the urban myths began to impinge upon the historical world. Because there was now greater reliance upon human ingenuity, people began to see themselves as independent agents. Their own activities came to the foreground, and, increasingly, the gods seemed more distant. Poets began to reinterpret the old stories.
This distancing of the sacred from daily life lead to a "spiritual vacuum", and the concept of religion was born, in what is termed the "Axial Age". Instead of rituals and sacrifices carried out mindlessly, living lives with moral responsibility and compassion was advocated by various spiritual teachers who sprung up across the world during this period; who also advocated introspection, looking within oneself for one's own spiritual salvation.
In the Post-Axial Age, for a long period, there was no development in mythology. The religions of the Levant moved more and more towards historicity, but even then, space was left the practice of myth, like the Jewish Kabbalah and Sufism. (What the author does not state explicitly, but what could be inferred, was that myth somehow stagnated and religion based on static stories instead of the dynamically changing ones of the mythic ritual started to gain ascendance. So for example, instead of the god who was killed and resurrected in perpetuity, Christ became a historical figure who was killed and came back to life at a specific point of time in history.)
But the big change, according to Ms. Armstrong, came with the Industrial Revolution.During the sixteenth century, almost by trial and error, the people of Europe and, later, in what would become the United States of America, had begun to create a civilisation that was without precedent in world history, and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it would spread to other parts of the globe. This was the last of the great revolutions in human experience. Like the discovery of agriculture or the invention of the city, it would have a profound impact, whose effect we are only now beginning to appreciate. Life would never be the same again, and perhaps the most significant – and potentially disastrous – result of this new experiment was the death of mythology.
Now logos took over totally - and mythos was dumped into the dustbin as a useless legacy.The Western achievement relied on the triumph of the pragmatic, scientific spirit. Efficiency was the new watchword. Everything had to work. A new idea or an invention had to be capable of rational proof and be shown to conform to the external world. Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve a greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh. The new hero of Western society was henceforth the scientist or the inventor, who was venturing into uncharted realms for the sake of his society. He would often have to overthrow old sanctities – just as the Axial sages had done. But the heroes of Western modernity would be technological or scientific geniuses of logos, not the spiritual geniuses inspired by mythos. This meant that intuitive, mythical modes of thought would be neglected in favour of the more pragmatic, logical spirit of scientific rationality. Because most Western people did not use myth, many would lose all sense of what it was.
Thus discredited, even the religious forswore myth and its essential unreality; and religion began to get ossified, as it had to prove all its claims rationally. And, as the author says, when you start proving the creation myths of the Genesis scientifically, you have "very bad science and very bad religion".
On the other side, it became the habit of "rational" men to denigrate myth, and to extol the "death of God". A myth-free future began to be envisaged, where religion will totally vanish and we would all live perfectly rational lives. Organised religion may very well disappear; but as Ms. Armstrong says, the need for myth will never vanish.We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’.
So are we lost? destined to live out our lives in myth-less (and mirthless) world? Not really, as even today we have our mythographers, our shamans, our sages - the artists and the writers.
Karen Armstrong says (and in this, she echoes Joseph Campbell) that art, and literature, by blurring the boundaries between "truth" and "falsehood" - between "reality" and "fiction" - takes us to the mythical realm, the realm of transcendence, of the dreamtime where spatial and temporal boundaries have no meaning. When Picasso shows us the horrors of war through a seemingly absurd cubist painting; when Joseph Conrad writes a dark fable of renegade soldier as a parable about the heart of darkness; when T. S. Eliot makes us wander through the waste land of a dead civilisation... myth comes alive. Then we move out of the mundane world ruled tyrannically by logos into the zone where we touch the Godhead; the still centre of existence, where Nirvana can be encountered. -
A brief but highly instructive overview of the development of mythology throughout the Western World and the Middle East (with a quick look at China). Armstrong breaks down the history into epochs. We're in the time of no myths, leading to a sense of despair and a loss of felt meaning to life (according to Armstrong: makes sense to me).
Interesting to me was her connections between myth story, ritual, and life enactment. It makes it clearer to me why I'm a Catholic (embracing the mythology in its best sense, the rituals, and the prescriptions for daily living) and not a Protestant. (Of course, the Church has many problems, but in this area it's interesting for the ways in which it preserves myth). However, as a culture, we don't have meaningful shared myths and, says Armstrong, that leaves people paralyzed emotionally. She refers to Eliot's
The Waste Land as a description of what happens when people lose their myths.
Armstrong feels that art and literature have tried to take the place of a shared mythology. According to her (if I'm understanding correctly), it's only been partially successful in that only a small group of people are engaging in these activities (either as creator or audience) and because there are no rituals that bring people into the activity and transform them.
I'm still thinking over her arguments. For a short book, there's a lot of information and as a writer I found some of it especially interesting. I do believe that we have a need for something that both undergirds and transcends our daily life; I'm just not sure what that should be. Certainly, literature and art fill a large part of that need but Armstrong's ideas about the necessity of ritual acts as well as connections to daily life are intriguing.
I do think that the book connects a lot of today's problems with fundamentalist religions with the loss of mythmaking capacities and the forcing of often symbolic texts into literal interpretations.
Quick read but with lots to think about and enjoy. I definitely would like to read more deeply and I wish Armstrong had provided a recommended reading list to guide me. It's such a huge topic--I don't know where to begin.
If anyone has any suggestions for me, I'd love to hear them! -
الكتاب في مجمله يروج ويستجدي المنهجية الإلحادية المعتادة في إبراز الأديان على أنها أختراع بشري محض وعدم التفريق المتعمد بين الدين والأسطورة وجعل كليهما نابعاً من ثقافة بشرية قديمة تطورت معاً في قالب إجتماعي-حضاري أدت في النهاية وحسب الترتيب الزمني لتطور الزمني للأنسان والحضارة , إبتداءاً من زمن ميثولوجيا الصيادين ثم العصر الحجري ونهاية بالأديان الأبراهيمية الثلاث ,هذه الفرضية التي وضعتها الكاتبة جعلت الأديان التوحيدية كنهاية لعصر الميثولوجيا القديمة وبدء المرحلة ما قبل الأخيرة , ثم السقوط التدريجي للحس الأسطوري مع بدء عصر النهضة الأوروبية وتحول الدين نفسه الى أسطورة من أساطير الأولين في نظر الكثير من الفلاسفة الحاليين..
وأيضاً وصم كل معجزات الأنبياء بالأساطير والخرافات هو مصادرة على المطلوب من دون تأصيل ولا بحث في مضمون تلك المعجزات وجوهرها والفرق الشاسع بينها وبين أساطير الديانات القديمة ..
الكتاب ثقيل وممل رغم تحمسي في البداية حين أطلعت على نبذة من الكتاب ولكن ما إن تبدأ بقرائته حتى تشعر بالضياع والتشتت بين صفحاته.. -
I should have been warned by the title. It is impossible for someone capable of writing 15 books on topics as diverse as the development of sexism, St. Paul, life in the convent, Islam, the English mystics of the 14th century, and so on, to have had time to study the subject of mythology sufficiently well to understand it, let alone put it together in such a way that others can understand it on any but the most superficial (and European biased) level. And to call it a history in the roughly 27,000 words of this book is a serious misnomer. People do like short, cut-to-the-chase analyses of tough subjects. Can't blame them for that. But there are subjects such as the history of myth (which is basically the history of the human psyche) that do not lend themselves to such summaries. Myths do connect, from country to country, as from Paleolithic to Mesolithic to Neolithic to Bronze to Iron Age, and so on, but it would take a mightily trained intellect and a lifetime of reading to find the threads, if such do exist, that would make a "short" history accurate or even marginally close to correct. For the $25 this book cost, buy the interviews with Joseph Campbell that Bill Moyers had on Public television, and that were later written up as "The Power of Myth".
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بیشتر شبیه یک یادداشت بلند تا یک بررسی. تقریبا از هرچیز فقط سرفصل ارائه میکرد و توی هیچ چیزی ریز نمیشد.
من چندان دوس نداشتم -
I guess, after reading
Mircea Eliade’s related works, nothing can surprise you. This book doesn’t bring anything new and I can’t even say that it’s well written. Or maybe it’s the translation, although it doesn’t seem so.
It reads like a summary and that’s exactly what it is. Half the book has references from
Eliade’s works, the other half from various other authors, which I’m not familiar with but I don’t think I want to be: Adonis, a political myth (according to
Robert A. Segal)? Hm. I’m all for different interpretations, ‘everybody reads a different story in the same book’, but to me this interpretation seems rather out of context.
Anyway, for one who is not familiar with myths history, could be an acceptable start. However, if you know the drill, skip it altogether. -
Karen Armstrong suggests the history of myth is the history of humanity; our stories and beliefs link us to our ancestors and each other. This wonderful book takes the reader from the Palaeolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to modern times when myths have almost all been discredited by science.
Armstrong makes the point that today we still seek heroes but that this adulation is unbalanced. The myth of the hero was never intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was intended to tap into the vein of heroism within all of us.
We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, myths that help us create a spiritual attitude, and myths that help us venerate the earth as sacred once again, otherwise we will not save our planet, if we just regard it as a resource.
Armstrong also makes a great point about the early hunters who felt a kinship with the animals that they killed. They expressed their distress in the rituals of sacrifice which honoured the beasts which had died for the sake of humanity.
Superb book. Recommended. -
The best of this is where she explains that myths have two lives. There is the myth as it is supposed to have happened once in historical time – Jesus at the last supper sharing his body and blood with his followers – and the myth that is forever present and forever made new – the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist (and to many Christians, particularly those who believe in the literal transubstantiation of the bread and wine, this is the literal presence of Jesus today and always) is the forever renewed reliving of that mythic experience. That is, there is the actual experience that only 13 people shared in, and then the ritual deed in which billions have taken part and in a sense these are both the same experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot of about this sort of thing lately, mostly after reading
The Happiness Hypothesis Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. If I was to set out my credo I guess one of the things that would have to go onto my list of beliefs would be that I believe in metaphor. I believe that how we structure the world into networks of metaphors structures how we are able to view the world at all. In this sense we are the metaphors which we use to view our world. The man who views women as conquests, the politician who views the war in Iraq as a crusade or the employer who views her workers as human resources – with these metaphors we structure our experiences.
This book implies that myths are a bit like my metaphors, ways to structure the world so that it makes sense, but that myths change with history and in ways that reflect the social concerns of people living in the world and experienced by people at particular developmental stages. AS Hegel says of tradition, myths are not fixed statues, but rather flowing rivers that start as streams and become mighty as they rush to the sea. So that the myths that might have been appropriate to Neanderthals (and I won’t bore you with her speculations here or my reply concerning separate species) would clearly not be appropriate to those living as farmers following the agricultural revolution. Likewise for those living later in city-states and one step removed from the rhythms of nature there needed to be new myths. The interesting thing is that these myths build on each other often growing in significance, rather than being replaced outright. Perhaps harvest myths do not have the life and death meaning to us today in the first world 21st century that they did to an Ancient Greek farmer, but we are still moved by the myth of Persephone and Demeter. The myth still holds significance for us.
With the Enlightenment it became increasingly difficult for people to believe and to be guided by the myths as had been practiced up until then. History is seen in this book as a struggle between mythos and logos (the world as revelation of truth through parable and story and the world as understood through natural laws). With the Enlightenment there was a move away from mythos towards science as the great hope that would explain the human condition without need of ‘stories’. There was, of course, counter moves – Pascal is given as an example here with his horror of an empty universe and of a humanity stuck in a tiny, insignificant corner devoid of meaning and without value or hope. This vision could only be bleak for Pascal and it is not hard to see why.
And so we get Nietzsche, who created the myth of God’s death, the myth of the eternal return, the myth of the will to power of the artist, as his way to again allow humanity to live with the terror of the fundamental meaninglessness of our existence.
At the end of this short history we are more or less in the 1920s. The new myths are seen as manifest in art and the art is that of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – and all of these deeply symbolic works drawing on the wealth of images from the whole of Western (and at least in Eliot’s case, some Eastern too) myths and traditions. As she quotes herself: These fragments have I shorn against my ruin.
She also refers to Picasso’s Guernica – with its nightmarish references to Christian martyrdom and hideous revisioning of Madonna and Child as a way to ‘make sense’ of the fascist bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.
The message of this book is that it is very hard for us in the first world, a world dominated by science and reason and ‘logos’ to have a world of myth in quite the same way that the pre-Enlightenment world lived in a world of myth. Nevertheless, science does not provide us with answers to all questions of importance to us. Science is ‘valueless’ in the sense that the same knowledge that can convert the energy of a uranium atom to enable us to power a city can also be use to reduce that city to ashes. To have compassion, understanding and to overcome the solipsistic selfishness of modernity requires some type of mythos, some sort of connection to what I have hesitated to call the spiritual realm. Interestingly, she views this realm as being provided today not by organised religion as much as by art and artists in our all-too-modern world.
Although I would find it hard to accept this thesis without reservations – not the least because I don’t really share Pascal’s terror and so have never felt the need of Nietzsche’s sacrament – I do think there is a need for metaphors by which we can understand the world and that this is an important thing Art can do for us. As someone who has never quite understood the religious experience, the aesthetic experience is the only one I can claim access to and its importance to me is heightened accordingly.
A couple of years ago I sat at the National Gallery and watched a series of films being played on the walls of the contemporary art space on the top floor. I later took various people there to sit with me and watch these films. They were quite simple in execution. A Latin American artist who used water to paint the faces of men and women who had gone missing, never to be seen again with the assistance of their government (and the US government too, of course). The water was applied to what I take to have been warm stone so that the image appeared as dark patches on the stone and started to evaporate as soon as it was applied. This meant that the faces would appear and then slowly melt back to nothing. Then another face was drawn. I was transfixed. Every time I went to see this, perhaps four times, I could hardly contain my emotions. So much pain, but perhaps being confronted by the terrible and universal transience of human existence, so beautifully displayed in this work of art, perhaps this would be enough to show us, as it showed me, our common humanity, our common responsibility, our need to act in common to stop such inhumanity.
If this is the power of myth, then we need myths of this kind, we need ways that allow us to see the world anew – even if anew in all its horror. There were parts of this book where I felt things were tending towards New Age nonsense and perhaps some of the explanations (particularly of the ‘meanings’ of Neolithic art which I took to be a bit of a stretch) didn’t really explain anything – but there was enough here in this very short book to chew over. And I ask for little more. -
ما باید از این خطای قرن نوزدهمی که اسطوره را دروغ یا نمایشگر شیوهی پستتری از اندیشه میدانست بپرهیزیم. ما امروز به اسطورههایی نیاز داریم که به ما کمک کنند خود را نه با قبیله قومی، ملی یا ایدئولوژیکمان، بلکه با همه همنوعانمان همذات کنیم. به اسطورههایی نیاز داریم که به ما کمک کنند اهمیت همدردی را دریابیم؛ عنصری که در دنیای عقلانی و عملگرای ما به قدر کافی بارور یا کارآمد نیست. به اسطورههای نیاز داریم که به ما کمک کنند نگرشی معنوی بیافرینیم، فراتر از نیازهای فوری و فوتی خود را ببینیم، و بتوانیم ارزشی متعالی را تجربه کنیم که منیت خودخواهانه ما را به چالش بکشد. به اسطورههایی نیاز داریم که به ما کمک کنند بار دیگر به زمین همچون موجودیتی مقدس احترام بگذاریم و از بهرهگیری صرف از آن به عنوان یک منبع بپرهیزیم. این موضوع بسیار مهم است چون اگر دست به نوعی انقلاب معنوی نزنیم که بتواند همپای نبوغ فناوری حرکت کند، سیارهمان را حفظ نخواهیم کرد.
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konuya ilgi duyanlar daha önce başka kaynaklar okumuşsa çok da yeni birseyler soylemeyecektir kitap. ayrica öne sürdüğü tezler benim için çok ikna edici olmadı.
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A Short History of Myth lives up to its title but despite its brevity is well worth reading. It’s an extended introductory essay to the Canongate Myth series, several volumes of which I’ve read: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, and A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok, respectively, reinterpretations of The Odyssey, the Atlas myth, and the Viking Apocalypse.(1)
Armstrong asserts that myths are timeless stories that define what life is about. They answer questions such as why are we here? what is our relationship to the divine? where do we come from?, etc. They may arise from an actual event but aren’t bound by historical narrative. One of the examples Armstrong uses is Jesus Christ. As a man, it’s well established that Jesus lived in 1st century AD Palestine, claimed to be a messiah, and that the Romans executed him. As the Christ, his message became fodder for Paul’s mythologizing, transcending the historical fact of his existence. From this point of view, it’s not essential that Jesus existed. [But that’s a topic for another book and not central to what Armstrong is talking about here.]
Back to myths in general...
Myths are often characterized by a concern with death and our fear of (personal) extinction. They’re intimately connected with rituals, without which they become meaningless or (at best) entertaining stories (a la TV’s Xena). The most influential myths force their protagonists (and, thus, us) to go beyond their experiences. Myths also show us how to behave.(2) And, finally, myths reflect the higher reality of which we can only catch glimpses (in ecstatic trances or via drugs, for example). The “truth” of a myth lies in its effectiveness. As Armstrong writes, “[i]f it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully, it is a valid myth” (p. 10).
In the Introduction, Armstrong mentions modern society’s near total alienation from myth, which she’ll return to at the conclusion. In between, she divides mythological development into six periods:
1. Paleolithic (pre-agriculture)
2. Neolithic (agriculture)
3. Beginning of urban civilization (Sumer, etc.)
4. Axial Age
5. Post-Axial (up to the Reformation in Europe)
6. Post-Reformation Europe
Paleolithic myth(3) arose out of a desire to reconcile humanity with the violence by which they survived in the world – i.e., by hunting. Armstrong argues that in these earliest myths the “hero” was born. A person who faces the prospect of death and undergoes an arduous journey to return to his people with gifts and wisdom. She mentions Herakles and Artemis as most likely arising from this tradition. The chief divinity at this point, appears to have been a goddess figure (though this doesn’t imply that humans lived in a matriarchy, as some have argued).Why should a goddess have become so dominant in an aggressively male society? This may be due to an unconscious resentment of the female. The goddess of Catal Huyuk gives birth eternally, but her partner, the bull, must die. Hunters risked their lives to support their women and children. The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed. The hunters could see that women were the source of new life; it was they – not the expendable males – who ensured the continuity of the tribe. The female thus became an awe-inspiring icon of life itself – a life that required the ceaseless sacrifice of men and animals. (p. 39)
The Agricultural Revolution didn’t displace the goddess but humans adapted their hunting myths to reflect a new understanding of their relationship with the Earth. The goddess assumed more maternal and nurturing aspects. She still represented – at times – the implacable and fatal aspects of life but she was now also a force of creation. Armstrong concludes her Neolithic chapter with the suggestion that humans were able to find a sense of optimism absent in Paleolithic myths: “The initiation at Eleusis showed that the confrontation with death led to spiritual regeneration, and was a form of human pruning…. [I]t could enable you to live more fearlessly and therefore more fully her on earth, looking death calmly in the face. Indeed, every day we are forced to die to the self we have already achieved. In the Neolithic period too, the myths and rituals of passage helped people to accept their mortality, to pass on to the next stage, and to have the courage to change and grow” (p. 57).
The advent of cities caused yet another fundamental change in myth. Humans were gaining ever greater (though still precarious) control over their destinies and growing ever more alienated from Nature. And the gods reflected that new distance. Myths arose or were adapted to celebrate and justify cities, writing, bureaucracy, and the other appurtenances of civilization. Another interesting development was the increasing prominence of human agents, as in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which challenged the traditional mythology of the Mother Goddess and asserted that it was best for gods and humans to remain apart.
The loss of the old certainties embodied in Neolithic mythology led to the spiritual crisis that ushered in the Axial Age (beginning around 800 BC). “[The Axial Age] marks the beginning of religion as we know it” (p. 79). In terms of myths, they became more introspective and often had an ethical cast. And the gods (or God in the case of the Jews) continued to become more remote. It became impossible to experience the sacred in everyday life; only through breaking down the normal consciousness could people contact the divine. In this section of the book, Armstrong reviews the varying responses China, India, Israel and the Greeks developed in response.
And their responses (including the later developments of Christianity and Islam) held true until the 16th century AD, when Europe entered the Modern Era, a chief aspect of which “was the death of mythology” (p. 119):The Western achievement relied on the triumph of the pragmatic, scientific spirit. Efficiency was the new watchword. Everything had to work. A new idea or an invention had to be capable of rational proof and be shown to confirm to the external worlds. Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve a greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh….
But logos had never been able to provide human begins with the sense of significance that they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given structure and meaning to life, but as modernization progressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was increasingly discredited. As early at the sixteenth century, we see more evidence of a numbing despair, a creeping mental paralysis, and a sense of impotence and rage as the old mythical way of thought crumbled and nothing new appeared to take its place. We are seeing a similar anomie today in developing countries that are still in the earlier stages of modernization (pp. 121-2).(4)
The loss of mythology has made it difficult for people to face the unspeakable, though not for want of trying. Art, music, drugs, films and more: all attempts to recapture the certitude and significance that mythology had formerly supplied. “But there is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative” (p. 135).
In the last few pages of the book, Armstrong calls for new myths (or – as we shall see – myth-like stories) that will help us identify with our fellow humans, realize the importance of compassion, create a spiritual attitude that challenges individual selfishness, and venerates the Earth as something more than a resource to be exploited. As she writes, “unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet” (p. 137).
She also connects this extended essay to the purpose of the Canongate myth series: Using the novel as a means of achieving what myth had done for our ancestors. She likens the reading of a book to meditation since readers have to live for a while in a world outside of their lives and – in a good novel – find themselves a different person when the experience is over.A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world (p. 149)
I would recommend taking a look at this book. It packs a lot into a small package, and there’s much that Armstrong can only assert without being able to back it up with extensive argument, but I think many of her points are defensible and much in her analysis of what’s wrong with our world, true.
1. My favorite is Weight but can recommend the other two as well.
2. This is not necessarily ethical behavior. The earliest myths are more concerned with ritual purity and preparing the listener for the afterlife, among other things. Morality – as we understand the term – would only become an integral part of mythology with the Axial Age.
3. I should mention that Armstrong’s focus in this short book is on West Asian mythology, though she’ll mention in passing other cultures.
4. I would say the “developed countries” are still attempting to cope with the modern world. -
I'll keep this short. This book is a fantastic mythology primer for:
A) Someone who's never read a single mythology book. Ever.
B) Anyone who finds Joseph Campbell too challenging
C) Those inclined to believe mythology can be explained by exactly one theory
D) All of the above -
يطرح الكتاب تعريف موجز للأسطورة ويبدأ بسؤال حول الهدف من الأسطورة ووجودها، فالأسطورة قديمة قدم الإنسان، بل إنها تسبق ظهور الإنسان العاقل فالإنسان غالباً ما يقع في أسر الغامض، عصي التفسير، عند مواجهة المصاعب، ولعل هذا ما دفعه منذ أن وجد الى إختلاق القصص بغية تفسير هذا الغموض والاجابة عن تساؤلات مصيرية مثل من نحن وكيف خلقنا وما هو مصيرنا بعد الموت
وكما تقول الكاتبة فالأسطورة ببساطة نسخة غير مكتملة، تعكس وعي وتفكير الكائنات البشرية الفانية، غير أن أهم ما يميزها إمكانية المشاركة، كما أنها تدفع البشر إلى تغيير أنظمة سلوكهم وقيمهم من أجل تذليل فهم ما يبدو عصياً على النفس،̼ كما أنها تعطينا أملاً جديداً كي نستمر في الحياة، فالغرض الأساسي من الأسطورة مع ما يرافقها من طقوس، هو التذكير بأن الأشياء ستصير الى الأسوأ قبل أن تتحسن -
There are some who are best at showing, and some that are best at telling. Karen Armstrong is best at telling. I really appreciate her lucid, straightforward narrative here, in such a huge, swimming subject. She rarely ever oversimplifies. It's like a little guidebook to western culture, and it often got me thinking about similarities between the role of myth and the role of art; I was a little surprised to see them converge so smartly at the end. The ending is more determined than I'd like it to be, and there are so many examples that could more complexly illustrate her points... but there will always be more to say, and ways to describe it. I've read a few of the re-shown myths in this series, and thus far this re-telling has been the most meaningful to me.
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This is interesting, although not exactly revelatory if you're interested in mythology and the like. I couldn't take it seriously after this section, though:
Why should a goddess have become so dominant in an aggressively male society? This may be due to an unconscious resentment of the female. The goddess of Catal Huyuk gives birth eternally, but her partner, the bull, must die. Hunters risked their lives to support their women and children. The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed. The hunters could see that women were the source of new life; it was they -- not the expendable males -- who ensured the continuity of the tribe. The female thus became an awe-inspiring icon of life itself -- a life that required the ceaseless sacrifice of men and animals.
...Which is not exactly the whole story, is it? Has this author heard of women dying in childbirth? I'm sure they did so plenty often in the Palaeolithic period. And the part about frustration from ritual celibacy, just, ugh. In this model she has the men voluntarily abstaining from sex and then blaming women for it. What?
Mind you, I know some men are perfectly capable of believing that, the whole idea just doesn't quite ring true for me as a model for society and religious belief.
Oh, and the idealisation of primitive belief over science is just. What? -
Armstrong declares, unconvincingly, that historically believers haven’t taken their holy texts literally. Her argument is unconvincing because it’s demonstrably false. Islam, for example, has hundreds of millions of adherents who would declare her claim ridiculous and demonstrate their disagreement vehemently. Their mythology is so literal to them that many of them live a life that's more similar to their religion's 7th century origins than it is to the modern world.
Entire nations live under systems, legal, moral, educational, that are ancient. A tiny percentage, of course, (royalty and oil barons) enjoy the fruits of a modern economic and political system, but the truth, the day-to-day realty, is that the vast majority live in a world that moved on without them centuries ago.
Armstrong claims that myth without liturgy is impotent. I would argue that myth without liturgy is exactly where the world needs to be - where an educated 40% (or so) of American are, where large swathes of Europeans have been for decades, even centuries.
I agree with other parts of her thesis: her realization that most religious figures were myths. She recognizes the historicity of the Buddha and Mohamed, though she inaccurately declares Jesus as an absolutely real historical figure. While many historians may agree that the anecdotal evidence points toward such a person having lived, not one shred of empirical evidence has been unearthed to prove this.
She also fails miserably in her argument when she states (twice) that humans are at the end of their biological evolution. This is not knowable. She’s basically declaring that she can see 10,000 or 20,000 years (or further) into the future. We simply cannot know what she claims to know, but the evidence of life on earth over the last 500 million years or so would demonstrate her claim as unlikely, if not outright ridiculous.
She seems to decry the awfulness of science, as exemplified by her obvious example of the atomic bomb, while completely, utterly and totally ignoring the crimes of religion. Her anti-science argument ignores that for the vast majority of people throughout history science has been lifesaving: vaccines, sanitation, transportation, education and discovery. Religion, while perhaps personally uplifting for some, has been the cause of misery, war and death.
Her affection for faith (which she calls myth, but who does she think she’s kidding?) would be charming, if it wasn’t so appalling in its one-sidedness. -
The first third of this book by Karen Armstrong overlaps much of the same material covered by Barbara J. King in her book Evolving God where she discusses the origins of religion from an anthropological point of view.
(link to my review of Evolving God.) King uses the word "religion" where Armstrong is using the word "myth." King used the word "belongingness" where Armstrong uses words such as "meaningfulness" to explain the human drive to create religion/myth. The following quotation of Karen Armstrong shows how her definition of mythology pretty much is the same as that which most of us think of as religion:
"... but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence...An experience of transcendence..."
She points out that the Neanderthals left signs of ritual, as did also Paleolithic era modern humans. Evidence of ritual acts is taken to be an indication of myth making. Myth is so intertwined with human prehistory and current history that it appears to be an integral part of being human. She defends myth making as a necessary human activity that provide a means to connect our finite lives with the infinite beyond us. In other words, myth gives our lives meaning and significance in an otherwise unfriendly world.
From speculation of paleolithic myths she progresses on to the better documented neolithic era myths. Here the book truly starts sounding like a "short history of myth" where the activites of the various gods and heros are reviewed.
Karen Armstrong applies the term myth to stories from monotheistic faiths along with the tales of Zeus or Odin which I suppose could bother those deeply enmeshed in western religion. But they are all obvious instances to mythologies trying to make sense of the unknown forces and destinies beyond human understanding.
In the final third of the book Armstong explores the role of myth in the age of enlightnment and modern era. Now that science and rational thought has removed much of the mystery from our lives, can we live without myth? Perhaps, but according to Armstrong we can't achieve human fulfillment and completeness if we try. For example, if you confine yourself to only rational thinking, how do you describe the human experience of art and music? She notes that artists and novelists are the current day myth makers. She suggests mythology is a valuable tool toward achieving good mental health.
"... purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live with the unacceptable. ... " She goes on to say that the role of "an ethically and spiritually informed mythology" can heal "deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses."
She admits that we can't simply ignore our rational education, but we can learn to appreciate the value of myth.
"We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures ..."
The following is my commentary (not necessarily ideas from the book):
Near the end of the book she gives a good summary of outstanding examples of 20th Century literary fiction, and she describes how the literature speaks to modern myth. It's a list of literature that most English teachers would probably support, but it's not necessarily the literature that has been widely read. Which is an observation that can probably be applied to this book as well. I'm not so sure that the view of myth presented in the book is the sort of view that can be appreciated by the population at large.
She is obviously accentuating the positive side of myth in this book. However, I can't help but think that the rise of radical fundamentalism in various faith traditions is a negative use of myth. So if our goal is to save the world's human community from militant religious fundamentalism which approach do you suppose is the more effective; A declaration that all myth is false, or a suggestion of an alternative interpretation of myth? I guess I'm suggesting that the later is the preferred approach. And this is a good reason to be informed about how myth can help us understand both ourselves and others. -
I love Karen Armstrong and I love what she's trying to get at in this short book (that humans need myths to make sense of the world), but the book is a little disappointing. First of all, she seems fixated on the Greek/Christian myths and not some of the earlier "pagan" narratives and she seems to be reasoning. backwards from where we ended instead of taking each era as it stands, which is a better way to do histories of myth.
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This short book is an attempt by Armstrong to reinstate a kind of appreciation of selected, mostly Western, myths after what she believes has been their modern discrediting by science. In doing so, Armstrong needs to strip the old myths of any historical relevance to reality to argue that they represent rather a kind of psychological reality and wisdom based on compassion, tolerance and understanding. The book ends with the hope that these virtues will survive through the work of artists, writers and other creators of fictional works.
Unfortunately, Armstrong's approach (presented in clear, simple, easy to read language) requires a reading of myth which may be difficult to justify. It is hard to argue convincingly that the originators of these myths 'knew' that their stories and their characters were not historically real but rather presented a deeper psychological reality. Whether these originators did or did not know this, the hearers of these myths DID take the characters in the stories to be real, and often based their subsequent personal or social actions, for good or ill, on those beliefs. By removing many of the nastier consequences of belief in myths to make them more palatable to certain modern sensibilities, I feel Armstrong distorts their original import. Better, in my opinion, to go to the original myths, with all their richness and often disturbing details, and enjoy them as literature only, rather than 'clean them up' as Armstrong seems to want us to do, thereby depriving them of most of their power.
It really is more credible in our time to consider the ancient myths merely as stories, just as today we read about magicians, teenage vampires, vampire killers, Jedi knights, time travel, parallel universes, etc. without feeling the need to believe in their reality, historical or otherwise. Whether they reveal deep psychological 'truths' or not is a moot point. How one 'reads' them is simply a matter of interpretation, not of spiritual, ethical, moral or religious sensibilities. All the great literature of the world deals with aspects of the human condition: none of it warrants worship or veneration as providing sacred insights, and certainly not absolute truth.
Looked at as literature we can also analyse all myths — ancient as well as modern — as representing a basic discontent and dislike of the world, and seeking some kind of relief from this idea by positing 'higher powers' or 'special powers' and 'other worlds'. Analysing the historical evolution of myths has shown us that their subjects, while perhaps describing certain human desires, ultimately personally failed to satisfy those desires. Indeed, they have often contributed to our discontent because of those failures. Any intelligent conclusion would be not to place our faith in them as representing any form of reality.
Further, to persist in believing in gods, spiritual realms, spirits, ghosts, elves, tooth fairies, Santa Claus, etc. is merely to persist in creating unhappiness when we come to realise they are all fantasies. Acknowledging that fact — rather than trying to 'respect' those beliefs simply because, for a short time, they might have made us happy — is part of the process of growing up, in the widest concept of that term. Armstrong's interpretation, alluring as it might appear in her book, does not assist us to grow up. -
If you think of this as an essay and NOT a history, it`s a very likeable book. It is beautifully written and full of interesting stuff that gets you thinking. I`d recommend it to anyone intererested in myth and the "nature of man" and such stuff.
But not so much to people interested in historical facts, as it makes huge sweeping statements based on a very narrow range of evidence. (What is the deal with social scientists? Are they overcompensating for the difficulty of testing their theories? Physical scientists often stress that a theory is just the best interpretation of the available evidence; social scientists look at one cave painting and tell us the "facts" about what prehistoric humans thought and felt. Sheesh.)
Perhaps the questionable factual nature of the book is intentional? She talks about how people used to look at history in terms of what events meant, whereas now we care about what actually happened. This book works as old-school history in that sense, and it gets you thinking about ways we making meaning of the way others made myths. But throughout the book, I felt that her interpretations were imposed on the past and that life was probably nothing like what this book claims. (And I found the idea of novels serving as mthys in the modern world, well, lame.)
But it was still a very good book and I liked it very much. My favourite part was a quote from Pascal that made me think I should read more works from the 17th century. I figure any book that makes me want to go read Pascal is an exceptionally good book. -
A rather nice overview. Armstrong tells things clearly and doesn't make the reader feel stupid. There is plently about myth connecting to religion, in particular how the age of Enlighment led to a reading of the Bible as truth, which Armstrong points out does a disservice to reliigon and myth. I found her idea about our age doing away with myth except in terms of literature to be interesting. She has a point, but the writers do carrry it. Perhaps we have just changed the nature of our myths - the popularity of vampires at the moment for instant could be tied, and is most likely tied to, this need for a myth as well as a need to re-invent it. For instance, how many UF vampires are really taken from the old vampiric folklore?
Armstrong also does a good job of showing the difference between myth and icons. She believes that we have now have icons (Princess Diana, for example) instead of myths. -
هرگز نمی توان به یک اسطوره از زاویه نظامی نزدیک شد. اسطوره تنها در یک بستر آئینی قابل درک بود که ان را از زندگی روزمره جدا می کرد. اسطوره را باید به عنوان بخشی از یک فرآیند تحول شخصی تجربه کرد. در حالیکه این ها در مورد رمان مصداق ندارد، زیرا می توان آان را همه جا و برکنار از دام های آئینی قرائت کرد. اما تجربه ی قرائت یک رمان کیفیت های معینی دارد که درک سنتی اسطوره را به یادمان می آورد. خوانندگان ناگزیرند روزها و حتی هفته ها با یک رمان زندگی کنند. آنها به خوبی می دانند که این قلمرو خیالی واقعی نیست، با این حال یک رمان خوب تا مدت ها پس از آن که کنارش می گذاریم، به بخشی از زندگی ما بدل می شود.
یک رمان چنانچه با توجه جدی نوشته و خوانده شود، مانند اسطوره یا هر اثر هنری بزرگ دیگر، می تواند به نوعی پاگشایی تبدیل شود و به ما کمک کند که آئین دردناک گذر از یک مرحله ی زندگی به مرحله ای دیگر، و یا گذر از یک وضعیت ذهنی به وضعیت دیگر، را پشت سر بگذاریم. هنرها به ما می آموزند که متفاوت ببینیم.
فصل آخر- تحول بزرگ غرب- ص 103و104 -
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